By Soulskill from Slashdot's make-sure-to-pick-up-the-socket-bonus department:An anonymous reader writes "One of the most dreaded hurdles on the PC upgrade path is the CPU socket. If socket design changes then you'll almost certainly need a new motherboard when you do upgrade. This is an area where AMD has historically been much better than Intel. Intel tends to change sockets with each generation of CPU — currently there are three types out there, LGA 1155 for Sandy Bridge, LGA 1156 for first generation core and LGA 1366 for the performance Core i7 processors. AMD on the other hand has always tried to keep sockets across generations. When it releases its new Bulldozer core desktop processors later this year AMD is having to make a socket shift from the current AM3 socket to a new one called AM3+. This article discusses the change, issues like backwards compatibility and what the industry is doing to prepare for the socket shift."

By Soulskill from Slashdot's dollars-and-sense department:Mr.Fork writes "Michael Geist, Canada's copyright law guru and law prof at the University of Ottawa, posted an interesting observation about the copyright issue of piracy. Canada's International Development Research Centre came to a conclusion that 'piracy is chiefly a product of a market failure, not a legal one' after a multi-year study of six relevant economies. 'Even in those jurisdictions where there are legal distribution channels, pricing renders many products unaffordable for the vast majority of the population. Foreign rights holders are often more concerned with preserving high prices in developed countries, rather than actively trying to engage the local population with reasonably-priced access. These strategies may maximize profits globally, but they also serve to facilitate pirate markets in many developed countries.'"

By samzenpus from Slashdot's read-all-about-it department:brothke writes "When I initially read 15 Minutes Including Q&A: A Plan to Save the World From Lousy Presentations, I enjoyed it and thought it was a good book. It was only a few days later, sitting through yet another tedious vendor briefing, when I reread it and truly appreciated how awesome a book it really is." Read on to see what Ben has to say about this book. 15 Minutes Including Q&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;A: A Plan to Save the World From Lousy Presentation author Joey Asher pages 112 publisher Persuasive Speaker Press rating 10/10 reviewer Ben Rothke ISBN 0978577620 summary Great book on how to make your presentation heard

By Soulskill from Slashdot's who-got-their-alphabet-in-my-math department:ChadHurley writes with this quote from the Washington Post:"Of all of the classes offered in high school, Algebra II is the leading predictor of college and work success, according to research that has launched a growing national movement to require it of graduates. In recent years, 20 states and the District have moved to raise graduation requirements to include Algebra II, and its complexities are being demanded of more and more students. The effort has been led by Achieve, a group organized by governors and business leaders and funded by corporations and their foundations, to improve the skills of the workforce. Although US economic strength has been attributed in part to high levels of education, the workforce is lagging in the percentage of younger workers with college degrees, according to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development."

By CmdrTaco from Slashdot's sorry-bout-that-my-bad department:Orome1 writes "The recent Play.com breach has been tied to the attack that its marketing communications firm Silverpop — a company that services over 105 customers, among whom are Walgreens and McDonalds — suffered last December. But the latest breach will likely have the biggest impact, because marketing services provider Epsilon — the largest one in the world — has notified its customers of a breach that likely compromised all of their mailing lists. Among Epsilon's customers are US Bank, JPMorgan Chase, TiVo, Capital One, the Home Shopping Network, LL Bean Visa Card, Ritz-Carlton Rewards, Best Buy, Disney Destinations, Walgreens, and many more." How many apology emails have you got so far today?

By CmdrTaco from Slashdot's where-have-i-heard-that-before department:TAGmclaren writes "The Harvard Business Review is running an article stating that it's not India or China that are the greatest threat to technological innovation happening in America. Rather, it's the 'big content' players, particularly the movie and music industry. From the article: 'the Big Content players do not understand technology, and never have. Rather than see it as an opportunity to reach new audiences, technology has always been a threat to them. Example after example abounds of this attitude; whether it was the VCR which was "to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone" as famed movie industry lobbyist Jack Valenti put it at a congressional hearing, or MP3 technology, which they tried to sue out of existence.'"

By CmdrTaco from Slashdot's get-it-right-this-time department:suraj.sun writes "Major browser makers are beginning to revisit how they handle Web authentication after last month's breach that allowed a hacker to impersonate sites including Google, Yahoo, and Skype. Currently, everyone from the Tunisian government to a wireless carrier in the United Arab Emirates that implanted spyware on customers' BlackBerry devices and scores of German colleges are trusted to issue digital certificates for the largest and most popular sites on the Internet."

mriya3 noted that "BEA, the French air accident investigation office, reports that the wreckage of Air France flight 447 has been found. The plane, an Airbus A330, crashed June 1, 2009 while flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. Investigators hope to find the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder. A press conference will be held today."

By timothy from Slashdot's difficult-to-weave-the-net-just-so department:An anonymous reader submits this musing from Philip Greenspun's blog: "Aside from wondering who will pay more than the cost of a Wall Street Journal subscription in order to subscribe to the New York Times, my biggest question right now is how the NY Times spent a reported $40-50 million writing the code (Bloomberg; other sources are consistent). Google was financed with $25 million. The New York Times already had a credit card processing system for selling home delivery. It already had a database management system for keeping track of Web site registrants. What did they spend the $40-50 million on?" Maybe the folks behind CityTime were free on weekends.

By timothy from Slashdot's dog-bites-man-sun-sets-as-usual department:ktetch-pirate writes "Operation In Our Sites, a US Government-led domain seizure action to deal with piracy, is pretty much a failure. TorrentFreak has examined a significant number of sites that have gone on pretty much unhindered, despite the seizures. Already some questions have been asked about the constitutionality of the seizures, and the evidence used as justification, but it seems the end results weren't as good as boasted either."

By timothy from Slashdot's well-it's-a-big-place department:jones_supa writes "A previously unknown dinosaur has been identified from fossils dug up in China and has been nicknamed as 'T-Rex's cousin.' The gigantic creature roamed North America and east Asia between about 65 million and 99 million years ago. Named in honour of Zhucheng as Zhuchentyrannus magnus, this animal was about 11 metres long, 4 metres tall and it weighed about 6 tonnes. The research team was led by Dr. David Hone, from University College Dublin school of biology and environmental science."

By timothy from Slashdot's only-has-to-be-good-enough department:An anonymous reader submits with word of a leaked document that indicates that British Telecom "has plans to launch a new Music Download Service which it hopes will steer users away from P2P File Sharing . The introduction of the new service is aimed at giving its customers a alternative to file sharing and is already in the works with talks ongoing between the ISP and music labels such as Universal and EMI. When launched 'in the near future' the service is expected to offer BT's 5.5 million customers completely free music downloads for an initial period of 6-9 months after which an undecided monthly subscription fee will be charged for continued access to the service. The finer details of how the service will look and function is unknown at this stage, but will play a huge part in how successful (if at all) the service will be. Services like Spotify already exist and are hugely popular in the UK meaning BT will have to go the extra mile to convince users they have a service worth using."

By timothy from Slashdot's clickaclicka-click-click department:According to an article at The Sydney Morning Herald, "China has detected 10 cases of radioactive contamination among passengers, aircraft, ships and containers arriving from Japan since March 16, quarantine authorities said on Saturday. On Wednesday, radiation exceeding permitted levels was detected on two ships from the Japanese port of Chiba, near Tokyo, in the ports of Nantong and Zhangjiagang, Li Yuanping, spokesman of the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, said on its website." Meanwhile, airborne radiation from Japan is detectable in China, but thus far not considered a danger.

By timothy from Slashdot's taking-blinded-by-science-literally department:Hugh Pickens writes writes "Scientific American reports that a newly patented method of non-lethal incapacitation can render an assailant helpless for several minutes by overloading the neural networks connected to the retina with a brief flash of high-intensity light. 'It's the inverse of blindness—the technical term is a loss of contrast sensitivity,' says Todd Eisenberg, the engineer who invented the device. The device consists of a 75-watt lamp, combined with optics that collect and focus the visible light into a targeted beam, which can be aimed like a flashlight to project a controlled beam of white light more than 10 times more intense than an aircraft landing light with a range as far away as 150 feet. Recovery time ranges from 'seconds to 20 minutes,' says Eisenberg. 'It's very analogous to walking from a very bright room into a very dark room.'"